Chick Flicks

Abstract

The film genre known as the “chick flick” refers very broadly to films targeting female audiences. More specifically, it refers to successful popular movies made during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries, largely romantic comedies, that are ironic and self‐conscious in tone, highlight fashion and consumer culture more generally as necessary to femininity, and promote heterosexuality and marriage. These films endorse some aspects of second‐wave feminism, without affirming the movement as a whole; as a consequence they are often characterized as postfeminist or neofeminist.